In 2008 Clay Shirky coined the phrase “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” In 2011 this was reversed by Nicolas Carr stating: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter success.” He also stated that we were in fact getting dumbed down by filters like Google. Eli Pariser at TED gave a presentation called Beware online “filter bubbles” which gave a warning of the dangers of filters and personalization. So are we going filter mad? Read further >

I’ve been a long-term subscriber to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal but recently upgraded to the Wall Street Journal Professional Edition with Factiva. Now I already subscribe to Factiva at work, but that subscription is for use at work. I certainly can access the Wall Street Journal through it. I know the value of Factiva as a value-added aggregator of news and business information. It offers content in multiple languages, organizes all of that content under standardized metadata, and presents it with helpful post-search filters. I receive email alerts. Factiva organizes tens of thousands of commercial publications and public websites by a search box and topics, not by a particular publication. Read further >

I think that the answer is “no.” Insights from publishing history reveals why. Print-based publishing evolved over hundreds of years and developed standard templates for expressing knowledge: hard and soft-bound books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and looseleafs. Re-usable navigation tools appeared across these print products, including tables of contents, topical and keyword indexes, chapters, sections and sub-sections, paragraphs and page numbers. Read further >

Recently I started to see QR codes become more common. In case you wonder what a QR code is: Wikipedia says “A QR code (short for Quick Response) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.” Read further >

One way of aggregating news feeds for customers is through RSS feeds. RSS allows customers to pull content into one feed so that they can access a variety of resources in one place. I have an RSS feed through Google Reader, but I realized recently that I don’t look at it as much as I check Twitter. To be honest, I haven’t looked at Google Reader in months, and I’m trying to figure out why. Both require me to take some action in visiting the Web site, but it has become more routine to check Twitter at least once a day. I tend to forget to check Google Reader at all. Read further >

Most of what’s happening on the information super highway – at accelerating speeds – is just evolution as genuine as Darwin. Yet, most are still determined to call it cannibalism when a “new” service or product threatens the established business models. But as the saying goes: there’s so sense in beating a dead horse…better to trade it for a car while it’s still alive. Read further >

Last week I was in Beijing to meet with some of Wolters Kluwer’s strategic partners, Commercial Press and China Financial & Economic Publishing House. We discussed about how the transition of print publishing to electronic publishing actually requires far more than merely digitizing content and presenting it with a search engine. The shift to digital actually ends up shifting the entire organization to a wide range of digital products and services, new pricing models, and new relationships with customers. The only way to make this shift is for publishers to use the techniques of contextual design, customer intimacy, and user-centered design. Read further >

Some 25 years ago a revolution hit the publishing industry. Desktop Publishing became a reality with the Apple Macintosh, PageMaker, Postscript (the page description language created by Adobe), and, of course, the affordable Laserprinter. Suddenly it was much cheaper than ever before to create high quality publications. An important side effect was the availability of fonts (typefaces) to a much bigger community of graphical designers. At last designers could create both beautiful, high standard, practical printed material without any restrictions. Even better – in the slipstream of established type foundries, smaller, specialized type foundries emerged who designed many more fonts which in turn evoked a whole new graphical language. Read further >

In my recollection in Philip K. Dicks’ famous novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,’ humans differentiate themselves from others (animals and androids alike) by the sophistication of their tools. In today’s digital world the success of devices and platforms rely for a large part on the tools to make compelling content available on the device. Read further >

In a meeting I attended last week it struck me how informally we often speak about certain concepts that are key in defining state-of-the-art knowledge products. In this case the discussion was about the importance of a comprehensive approach to classifying our tax, legal and regulatory content, and about what kind of classification system to use: taxonomy, thesaurus or other. Read further >